Page 40 of Fated, Allegedly

I write four lines and nothing more, because the documents do the work.

Unpermitted subsurface excavation beneath a protected waterbody. Unpermitted industrial extraction, 940 ft below Stillwater Lake. Falsified geological consignments. Attached: operator's own ecological assessment, their haulage records, and their process diagrams. Their assessment predicts irreversible destruction of the waterbody. Erin Lawson, contract 4471.

The bar crawls. Eleven percent, then forty, then eighty-eight, and the whole time the horizon pressure on the right screen keeps stepping down, and I stand there watching two counters race each other with my hands flat. Sent at 2:41. Nash comes back with the room emptying behind him.

"Everyone's moving. Caleb's got the stairwell." He looks at the displays, then at me. "Tell me what you need."

"Two things at once, or it doesn't work." I sketch it behind the process diagram. "The helium compressor and the chilled-water supply to the resistor bank. Both on two-forty, both in that gallery, and both have to fail inside the same few seconds or the protection catches it. Isolate the water first, then kill the compressor, then get out of that room, because the pipework in there will be at operating temperature and it will let go. That's a plant room job, and it needs somebody who can read a valve tag and somebody strong enough to shut a twelve-inch gate valve fast. I can't do the second part. You can't do the first. So we do it together, which is, I believe the entire point of the last six weeks."

Nash actually laughs, which is deranged and exactly right.

"What holds the sequence while we're gone?"

"Nothing. It keeps running." I place my hand on the console. "That's the cost. The draw continues for however long it takes us to reach the two-forty level and do the work. I've thought about it and there's no way around it, because there's nobody left down here I'd trust with either half."

He takes my face in both hands, filthy and bleeding, with a machine turning over a cavity in this world just forty feet away.

"I love you." My voice holds, barely. "And I'm not doing this because I'm brave, and I'm not doing it for science, and I'm certainly not doing it for the state of New York. There are people up there who are all standing on the same well, and I got to find that out, and now I have to do something about it. That's all it is."

"That's everything it is." He kisses my forehead. "Then we go up, we break it, and we keep going for the riser."

I look one last time at the right-hand display. Horizon pressure, eighty-three percent and stepping down, and stage three flagged to begin in fifty-one minutes.

"Fifty-one minutes," I say. "After that there's no version of where the water stays a lake."

We run for the stairwell together.

26

NASH

The drift narrows to eleven feet at the old junction, and that's where I decide the whole night gets settled.

Behind me the evacuation is strung out for four hundred yards — four stretchers, eleven Helix technicians with their hands still half-raised, and every ally who can still walk, all of them moving toward the raise and the vent because it's the only road home. In front of me is a tunnel with lights coming up it. Helix has finally understood that the tunnel was theater, and they're pushing east to cut us off from the pipe.

They can't flank in a tunnel. That's the only gift the geometry gives us, and I intend to take it for as long as my body allows.

"Caleb!" I shout back down the drift. "How many still behind you?"

"Eighty-one!"

"Then I need eighty-one minutes. Move faster."

He starts calling people through the stope by name, and that's the sound I'll be hearing for the rest of my life. Sennet, go. Ketterings, both together. Grandmother, you're next and I don't want a debate, I've been warned about you.

They come in rushes and I shift on the second one, because there's no version of this a man wins.

The first pair don't get their muzzles level. The second pair are better and one of them puts rounds into my flank and I finish him anyway. It doesn't hurt yet. It will.

We give ground in yards, never in rushes, and every yard costs them somebody. Two Marrow wolves hold my left. The older one is the brother of the wolf we lost on the eastern approach an hour ago, and he fights like a man with nothing left to protect except other people's families.

At half past four they stop pushing the drift and put a team into the dead-end cross-cut.

It's the one from our first raid, the one that goes nowhere. Nobody bothers with it unless they've read the same 1957 survey sheets we did, and somebody has. They come out behind the line, into the section with the technicians and the stretchers and not one weapon among them.

I hear it start and I cannot leave this junction. If I turn around, everything comes down this tunnel at once and reaches the raise before anyone else does.

Caleb turns around instead. He puts himself in the mouth of that cross-cut with three wolves and he stays there. I hear him take two of them. I hear the burst that catches him. Then I hear him keep making noise afterward, loud and filthy and continuous, because a Beta who goes quiet tells the enemy the door is open.